Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to a cooking oil filtration systems.
Description of the Related Art
Cooking oils, such as those used in commercial or industrial deep fryers, tend to become contaminated with moisture, carbonized food particles, and the like during the frying process. Additionally cooking oils tend to detrimentally degrade or oxidize as water and other contaminants such as metal ions solubilize in the cooking oil. Such contaminants may be introduced by the food cooked in the oil or even from the surfaces of the deep fryer itself. Additionally, the oils themselves tend to break down chemically after extended use.
Left untreated, such used cooking oil will generally have unacceptably high concentrations of contaminants and chemical breakdown byproducts. These contaminants and chemical breakdown byproducts often have undesirable characteristics such as causing the oil to foam, smoke, smell bad, possess an unsightly appearance, and/or impart a bad taste to the fried food. It has been found that keeping the cooking oil clean by removing the particulate matter and filtering it on a regular basis tends to extend the useful life of the cooking oil and increase the quality and appearance of foods which are cooked therein.
Previous cooking oil filter media include wire mesh strainers, coarse paper, and diatomaceous earth or similar filtering material. Wire mesh strainers are restricted to the removal of large particulate matter. Conventional coarse paper filters (having a pore size of from 4 to 80 microns with a mean pore size on the order of 10 microns) exhibits only moderate filtering effectiveness. Diatomaceous earth and similar filtering materials usually exist in a loose form that is messy and awkward to handle.
Other known cooking oil filter media include filter sheet or filter pad media having a substantially planar form and which combine various filtration mechanisms over a depth of the sheet or pad to filter cooking oil in a particularly efficient manner. The filters described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,988,440, the entire content of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, provide examples of such filter media. Other examples of filter pad devices which are particularly effective in filtering cooking oil are marketed by Clarification Technology, Inc. of Kirkland, Wash. under the trademark SuperSorb®.
Traditional filter pads and similar devices frequently require operating personnel to drain or otherwise remove the used cooking oil from the deep fryer for treatment and/or filtration prior to returning the filtered cooking oil to the deep fryer. Removing the used cooking oil from the deep fryer, filtering the cooking oil through an external filtration system or device to provide a filtered cooking oil, and returning the filtered cooking oil to the deep fryer require operating personnel to handle the oil on multiple occasions, increasing the chance of a spill or injury.